Cross-lingual Semantic Parsing

Language and Computation Courses

Introductory Course

Semantic parsing deals with translating natural language utterances into something that a computer can “understand” – for example, into database queries, formal commands or logical formulas. In order to do this, computers need to learn to understand word meanings, and to combine them into utterance meanings. In this course, you will learn how this can be done using combinatory categorial grammars (CCG) and compositional semantics. Moreover, you will learn how parallel corpora and annotation projection can be used to do this cross-lingually, that is, for many different natural languages, with little additional human effort.

Prerequisites

Participants are assumed to have basic knowledge of (≈ have taken at least an introductory class in) each of the following areas: